Lorien – Infinite canvas drawing/whiteboarding app | Hacker News Reader

Lorien – Infinite canvas drawing/whiteboarding app

github.com

155 pointssanqui31 comments

Interesting that this is built on Godot. The Tesla Infotainment UI is also using Godot so it seem to be picking up steam in this sort of non-traditional application of game engines. Very cool!

Something cool about Godot for this use case: the Input API has cursor pressure and tilt builtin (already normalized too).

I keep getting impressed by how much stuff in Godot is… just there.

Dungeondraft also uses Godot! Really great application

https://dungeondraft.net/

Looks good. I would love to find one like this but open source.

Yeah it’s the only drm free one I could find.

I have used Milton for this for about a year or so. One thing I really like about Milton is the Grid tool, to create rows and columns. It’s great for sketching out ideas or calculations when learning. From what I can tell, Lorien just has Rectangles, so Grids would be a nice addition.

I think the Linux code for Milton had one or two issues when compiling on a modern Arch system, but I have a simple fix laying around if anybody else has trouble.

I should try Lorien though.

https://github.com/serge-rgb/milton

I saw Lorien a while ago, when I was looking to build a Godot program with an infinite canvas - some of the ways that the menus are things are setup are really, really clever.

If anyone is familiar with it, do you know where to look for good examples of such things for Godot? Maybe the author will bless this thread with presence and give us some tips or explain the thought processes when it comes to designing them in Godot.

Shoot your shot, right? Anyway, it's awesome to see it posted here!

Hey, just noticed Lorien got posted on here. No, i don't really have a general advice for that..all depends on what you want to build. I'd say start simple but as it grows you have to make sure your architecture stays clean, otherwise the whole thing becomes unmanageable. If you want to look at other big open source applications done in Godot look at Pixelorama and MaterialMaker (this one even got an Epic Mega Grant). There is also this list with great apps/pluings etc: https://github.com/godotengine/awesome-godot

Quite a few can be found here: https://itch.io/tools/tag-godot

Multiplayer mode would be a killer feature!

Someone made a prototype here: https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien/discussions/51 It's defininetly possible

The fact that it's built with a game engine may make it easier than it would otherwise be.

if there's a server which runs an authoritative source of the canvas, then it'd be easier.

If it's peer-to-peer, then a CRDT style data format would be required, and that's not "easy".

Godot's high level networking is so nice because it's easy to do either.

Since everything in Godot is nodes, you can assign "ownership" of nodes to peers. Every peer has full control over their nodes and then you sync the data via RPC.

That way, you can do authoritative by just giving all the ownerships to the server node, or p2p by sharing which nodes belong to who.

In the context of drawing though, yeah if you want people to mess with other people's strokes it becomes annoying.

A wasm web client based version of this would rock

This looks great, I've been looking for a replacement for Mischief. There aren't many vector based drawing apps with infinite canvas.

I tried it but like most note taking apps like this, I feel like that drawing with vectors just doesn't feel that great: The stroke changes a bit after being jotted down, the curves sometimes end up jagged, the erase experience sometimes leaves to be desired. And selection/lasso are either missing or underpar.

Mischief was the last app with this kind of features that felt right to me. I don't know if it's the use of ADF (Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields[1], think SDF but defined as quadtrees[2]) or what. Honestly if it wasn't for the lack of a lasso tool (which I was always hoping it would come until it died) I would still just use that.

[1]: https://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR2000-15.pdf - btw: Frisken made Mischief! [2]: Or octrees for 3D, which I think is what's used in the PS4 game "Dreams"

Dreams doesn’t quite use an octree SDF for its geometry representation.

It uses a tree of CSG edits (basically the raw stroke inputs) which is then stochastically sampled (as an SDF) to produce points on the surface that are splatted. Alex Evans’ talk on this is fantastic btw and I thoroughly recommend it.

Yeah, the main problem is that i did not implement proper brush stroke smoothing yet. A lasso tool would also be nice, yeah.

It's still 0.x software though...for the 1.0 release i want add all these things ;)

Godspeed!

0.x has no meaning to me, everyone's threshold of 1.0 is arbitrary anyway

Is there a good iPad app like this? I've tried OneNote but it gets real slow (Especially erasing) with large documents.

I use https://concepts.app/en/ for all iPad drawing. It features an infinite canvas, and is tuned for beautiful architectural drawings. I use it for math notes and illustration.

Like my academic colleagues, I was forced onto an iPad (I love chalk and paper) in order to teach remotely. Most of us settled on Notability, too freaked out to learn more than necessary to barely cope. Some realized that one wants all the algorithmic reach one can master, in this new medium. Concepts has many frustrating limitations, but in my opinion it is currently best of field.

In the far future, people will look back on 20th century mathematical notation as a form of sadism (here, look at my crappy machine code, and guess my thoughts!), and they'll mark the pandemic as a turning point where more effective visual forms of explanation first emerged. Playing with Concepts is a glimpse into the future.

While Concepts isn't limited to what can be rendered in SVG or PDF as scalable vector art, one can impose this limit on oneself.

One might have many requirements, choosing an iPad drawing program. My first requirement is that my handwriting doesn't suggest I've suffered a stroke. Believe it or not, this eliminates most of the field. Concepts has a smoothing parameter that makes one's handwriting look better than it would on paper, if one selects 8% to 12%.

I wrote a small SVG filter to convert Concepts artboards to paged PDF documents and diagrams that can be inserted into papers: https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards

Muse is a bit like this. You can also infinitely nest white boards. It’s really nice, though admittedly I haven’t gotten as much use out of it as I had hoped.

https://museapp.com/

Apple just announced their collaborative whiteboard product: Freeform

It will be available for iOS, iPad OS, and Mac OS later this year. https://www.xda-developers.com/apple-freeform-whiteboard-col...

You can see this app https://renote.so Collaborative work, sharing in web (real time), whiteboards and pages, and other.

Coincidentally, I installed and tested this last week.

It doesn't detect the use of the delete button in my stylus.

There's even an issue in GitHub about it: https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien/issues/118

I've been using this with my Wacom Tablet on Linux.

Really liking it so far, the keyboard bindings for common commands and simplicity and ease of use of the program keeps me coming back to it.

Looking forward to newer releases!

So will this work well with a wacom tablet? Funnily enough, I had been looking for something like this for sometime now

Yes, i use it on a Wacom all the time. It's basically designed to be used on drawing tablets.

apparently, because godot takes into account the pressure input, it might work!

How do I span and resize on a MacBook?

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